| Regarded as a subclass of pragmatic markers,discourse markers are particles used to direct or redirect the flow of conversation without adding any significant paraphrasable meaning to the discourse.Discourse markers also play significant roles in speeches.The author finds that most scholars adopt qualitative analysis to research the use and functions of discourse markers at present.However,the researches into discourse markers and metapragmatic awareness displayed by them based on TED corpus are rarely seen.This paper aims to analyze the application of the discourse markers and different awareness displayed by them in the TED corpus.Therefore,this study can help speakers grasp and use discourse markers from the perspective of metapragmatic awareness and achieve their speeches' intentions.This paper mainly attempts to answer the following two questions:(1)In the TED speech corpus,what is the usage frequency of each category of discourse markers and which discourse markers are the ones with high usage frequency in each category?(2)From the perspective of metapragmatic awareness,how metapragmatic awareness are revealed from the discourse markers used by the speakers?In order to solve these two questions,this paper selects 20 popular TED speeches which are each year's top 5 clicking ones from 2016 to 2019 as the corpus,adopts the categories of discourse markers set forth by Fraser(1996,2009)as the standard for the statistics of discourse markers,sets the categories of metapragmatic advanced by Michael Haugh(2014)as the foundation for theoretical research and employs Ant Conc to complete the qualitative analysis of the discourse markers,so as to analyze the metapragmatic awareness of discourse markers in the TED corpus.The results of the study are as follows:(1)Discourse markers are used approximately 118 times in each of these TED speeches,but the frequency of different categories of discourse markers are different in these speeches.Through the statistics of the frequency of each category,the paper discovers that and,so,but,still,instead,to start,as a result,anyway and above all are used more frequently.(2)Analyzing from the angle of metapragmatic awareness,this paper finds that each category of discourse markers possesses a variety of metapragmatic awareness: for instance,topic markers may present speakers' metacognitive awareness,and elaborative markers can present speakers' metacommunicative awareness,like identity construction.This study not only can enrich the metapragmatic study of discourse markers in speeches,but can promote the second language learners to understand the use of discourse markers and grasp their metapragmatic awareness in speeches,so as to encourage scholars to strengthen the use of discourse markers in speeches.However,the 20 speeches for this research are too few,limiting the overall study of discourse markers.In future researches,the author will collect more speeches as corpora to research and analyze metapragmatic awareness of discourse markers more scientifically and systematically. |
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